Department of English

Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University

The Heart of the Matter

(1948)

Graham Greene

(October 2, 1904–April 3, 1991)

Introduction

Why not begin at the beginning?

Wilson sat on the balcony of the Bedford Hotel with his bald pink knees thrust against the ironwork. It was Sunday and the Cathedral bell clanged for matins. On the other side of Bond Street, in the windows of the High School, sat the young negresses in dark-blue gym smocks engaged on the interminable task of trying to wave their wirespring hair. Wilson stroked his very young moustache and dreamed, waiting for his gin-and-bitters.

It is a celebrated opening: a Flaubertian precision of detail refracted through a cinematic lens; we know at once why Graham Greene called himself ‘a film man.’ It is a style one could call commercial realism—an often powerful, sometimes melodramatic mixture of the literary and the merely efficient. In a few lines, Greene establishes the terms of his locale as usefully as any movie’s opening tracking shot. He does so with considered authorial reticence, in homage to the notion that fictional narrative should show and not tell. But what, then, is shown? First, the Bedford Hotel and Bond Street. These canonical names, with their pale loyalty to the originals, tell us that we are likely to be in a British colony. Wilson’s shorts tell us the same thing too, but they have a deeper connotation: schoolboys wear shorts. So this pale young colonial overseer, who looks down on what he rules, is less a master than a child, the white negative of the black schoolgirls he can see on the other side of the street. Indeed, Wilson’s childish knees are pressed ‘against the ironwork’ of the balcony as if confined by the ironwork of a heavy school desk. Or perhaps more [end of page vii] sinisterly confined? It sounds as if these absurd knees might be imprisoned.

Greene’s first paragraph establishes not only the place but the terms of the book’s imagery: we are, it turns out, in an unnamed British colony in West Africa during the Second World War, closely based on Greene’s own experiences, in 1942–43, in Sierra Leone. Throughout the book, this closed community will be pictured as both a kind of minor boys’ boarding school and as a prison. Scobie, the book’s tormented protagonist, reflects that ‘one counted age by the years a man had served in the colony,’ rather—as is implied—as convicts measure their years inside. Later, as Greene introduces us to Scobie’s servant boy, Ali, we are told that he had been briefly in prison: ‘There was no disgrace about prison; it was an obstacle that no one could avoid forever.’

—James Wood, "Introduction," The Heart of the Matter, 1948, by Graham Greene, Penguin Books, 2004, pp. vii–xvi.

Reference

Wood, James. Introduction. The Heart of the Matter, by Graham Greene, Penguin Books, 2004, pp. vii–xvi.

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